WHEN:

Just a few days ago, Squidoo converted all groups into regular lenses. You can no longer add your lens to a group, and your existing lenses are no longer members of any group.

WHY:

Because groups were turning a bit spammy and useless, and nobody really got any great benefits out of joining a group except the groupmaster. This really isn’t how it should be, so goodbye groups.

BUT DON’T WORRY:

If you had a group, it all still looks pretty much intact, with your modules in their places, and your URL has stayed the same. So links you’ve set up to your group will still work, and Google will continue to index it as before.

GOOGLE RANKING:

So what can you use to replace the wonderful Google Ranking Power of a Squidoo Group? Right now you just have lenses. Groups ranked so well partly because you had instant backlinks to your group just by people adding lenses to it (every lens added linked to your group from their sidebar).

So to replicate the Google Ranking Power you just need to build more backlinks.

How hard can it be

Lewis

Joe will attempt to get a brand new lensmaster account from $0 to $2000-per-month, using only the tools available to all lensmasters.

So anyone will be able to emulate his success.

If you are able to join in, do it. Go for it.

You can read more here and here.

Good luck Joe!

Lewis

If a guestbook comment doesn’t say anything interesting, and add to the conversation, DON’T FEEL BAD ABOUT DELETING IT.

Don’t think just because someone left you a comment you have to publish it for all the world to see.

We’re not interested in having our lenses full of rubbish comments, are we?

Every time you approve a comment that isn’t useful or unique, you risk diluting the content on your lens.

Don’t be afraid of offending anyone. The kind of comments you should delete will be from people who write so many of them they won’t notice anyway.

I delete all comments that say nothing but:

+ Well done, great lens
+ I rated you 5*
+ Please check out my lens
+ This lens is good
+ Thanks for the info
+ This was helpful thanks

Well meaning, yes, but pointless.

Here’s a good general rule:

Only approve comments that will be useful to other readers.

That’s what I’m sticking to…

- Lewis

Any time you update certain webpages or publish a new blog post or lens, you can send a Ping for it.

A Ping is a little signal your new updated page sends to various search engines and directories. A ping is the online equivalent of your new lens running up to Google’s doorstep and ringing the doorbell. It’s a way for your lens to go out and get attention, shouting “I’m here! I’m updated!” instead of sitting around just waiting to be found.

PINGING YOUR LENSES

Sending out a ping for your new lenses is a very good idea. It can help you get indexed quicker, and is one of the reasons blog posts get indexed so fast.

You have a couple of options for pinging, and below are the fastest ways I’ve found:

1. SquidUtils.com – SquidUtils has a very useful ping tool that embeds itself right into your lens immediately after you click Publish. It’s super smart and also free.

You can find out all you need to know about SquidUtils addons and features here.

2. Pingoat.com – Pingoat is a very popular pinging service, and is also free. Unlike SquidUtils this one doesn’t embed itself right into your lens. I don’t really use Pingoat that often as I find SquidUtils to be sufficient and more convenient. Pingoat does ping more places though.

GENERAL ADVICE

Don’t ping every time for update your lens. Only when you first publish it and if you do any major updates where you add more content. Don’t go ping crazy on the same 1 lens!

Lewis

Here is what the official lens says:

“Squidoo is one of the largest websites in the world, with millions of pages, half a million members, more traffic than cbs.com and more than 20,000,000 page views a month. We’re hiring someone to run our ad and promotion sales efforts.”

Those are some impressive numbers! Half a million members! Crikey!

Squidoo aims to work directly with advertisers instead of just posting Google ads and Glam ads on your lenses, currently meaning some middle-man ad networks share the profits. This is good for us lensmasters because it will mean more ad money each month per lens.

Squidoo has a lot of influence and is going to use it to get a better deal.

But here’s the interesting bit….

“We’re focusing on more than just banners, leveraging our deep long tail of information combined with legions of motivated and talented users.”

What does that sound like to you?

I highly doubt ‘Paid Reviews’
Possibly a sponsored lens theme
InText links
Tag Page Specific Adverts

Interesting… Veeeery interesting…

Squidoo Tags are back in the game! They are now indexable by search engines once again!

I have been meaning to write this post for about two weeks, so here we go!

Very simple:

A while ago Squidoo HQ made some changes that made squidoo tags pretty useless. The tags pages were ranking very high in Google, which was good. Squidoo then made a change to block search engines from scanning the tags pages. They had their reasons of course.

Well now they’ve done some work to improve the tags pages, and search engines can see them again. So you will start seeing tags pages ranking in google again. We will hopefully see them ranking just as high as before, if not higher. We will keep our eyes peeled.

Why have they done this?

My guesses: Most likely because the tags pages…

a. Bring in ad revenue, from the AdSense ads displayed on the pages. (And what we’ve learned from the latest ad changes on squidoo, with ads EVERYWHERE, is that Squidoo likes its ad revenue!)

b. Bring in more visitors, as they tend to rank highly.

c. Link all lenses together, to create a giant lens network. Google likes useful on-topic stuff all linked together. It’s the jam on Google’s toast.

d. Get some people who land on tags pages (from google) investigating more than 1 lens on their visit to Squidoo.

So how are the tags pages different this time?

thefluffanutta, of SquidUtils.com, has given it a nice little run-down on his blog. It’s easiest for you to check it out there -http://squidutils.com/blog/squidoo/squidoo-tag-pages (His blog is a good one. You should subscribe to it.)

Now that tags pages are indexable again you should be paying particular attention to your primary tags. Perhaps today’s the day to take a second look at most of your lens tags!

Help: Tagging Tricks

What do you reckon? You happy to see tags back, working for you?

Lewis

How to get free [and easy] content for your lens from YouTube:

“Many marketers are being taught that video is a required element of their online success (and I agree). So if you go to YouTube you’ll find thousands (millions?) of videos for your niche on there by experts. Those video are able to be posted and shared on your website, correct? So here’s what you do.

Take a video in your niche, transcribe the words into text, and post the text on your [lens] WITH the video. You don’t want to just swipe the content alone because that’s stealing. But the perk you get is that Google will crawl your textual content and it can help you in the SERPs (search engine results pages). With the YouTube video, you’re only getting the description and title counting toward your content, but a full transcript gives much more fodder for SEO purposes.”

Add a relevant video using a YouTube module, transcribe the text into a Text module or into the youtube module itself, and you have extra content for Google to scan and rank you for.

EXCELLENT ADVICE!

You can see the full post and comments here.

Lewis

P.S. Tiff found the tip in the WarriorForum War Room [a password protected area you only see by paying].

The Bad:

Have you seen the new Text Ads that appear automatically on all your lenses?
If you haven’t go now and take a look at one of your lenses. There will be 3 links on your lenses in green, and hovering over them will pop up an ad box. Personally I hate these kinds of ads and have opted out of them. Whenever I visit a website that uses these ads I am VERY tempted to leave, and I definitely steer clear of their other links, so I do not want this to happen on my lenses. You can opt out by scrolling to the bottom of www.squidoo.com/member/profile

The Good:

Squidoo HQ has given us some figures to show that these tacky ads earn rather well for lensmasters.  What you should be careful of though is going after the money from these text link ads at the expense of your other lens-income. Lenses are covered in adverts as it is. I suppose it depends on how you use your lenses, what your goal is.

The Better:

In a forum post about these ads Megan from Squidoo HQ posted the following message: “We tried excluding the links from the Intro module, and that made revenue from these ads nosedive. Really nosedive. So we put them back in”.

So, good news!

Squidoo can see from their stats on over one million lenses that text links in intro modules get LOTS of clicks.

The Best:

Forget the text link ads – it’s time to go through all your lenses and add a relevant affiliate link to the intro module!

This could give you an extra revenue stream of several hundred dollars a month, with no info-ad-popups. I’m going through all my lenses, slowly, to do this.

What’s opposite of a nosedive? A noserise?

Lewis

P.S. yes yes yes, I should really have been doing this on every lenses I built anyway, but I’m only human! Sometimes it takes things like this to make you learn your lesson

Squidoo and Twitter have quite a nice little relationship going.

You can feature your latest Tweets in your lens, you can build a Twttrlist list lens, or a Twttrstrm lens, and of course just promote your latest lenses on Twitter!

So I thought I would put together a nice and easy list of….

Some ways to automate your Twitter account:

1. Schedule Tweets: With TweetLater.com you can set up as many tweets as you like to post on set dates in the future. Beyond the obvious ones like Christmas and other Holidays, you could do things with special offers, promoting your relevant webpages and lenses at the right time of year, every year, and even keep your profile active while you go on vacation or something. Scheduling Tweets sounds trivial but it can prove to be very useful indeed.

2. Automatically Follow People Who Follow You: Twitter is great at connecting you with a huge audience… but the strains of a huge audience are obvious. How can you possibly keep up with everyone who follows you? Twitter is meant to help you do the things you do right now, but better! It’s not means to steal hours from you every day. If you follow me on any of my Twitter accounts you’ll see me follow you back within minutes, automatically. Very useful indeed. This is from TweetLater.com also.

3. Automate Direct Messages: When you follow me on any of my accounts, and I follow you back automatically, you will get a Direct Message from me saying hi. You can set your own automatic direct message to say whatever you like. Advice: Don’t just say hello and ask them to check out your website. That sucks. Connect with people instead. Try asking a question, and maybe asking for them to @reply instead of DM reply. Note: I have turned this feature off now, just because I hate Direct Messages. People were replying to me and I would never remember to check to reply.

4. Turn any RSS feed into Twitter posts: This will apply to you if you post content on any of the following sites – Wordpress, Squidoo, BlogSpot, Tumblr, Typepad, HubPages, EzineArticles, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, actually pretty much any modern website! Use TwitterFeed.com to set up an “RSS Feed To Twitter”. It’s all automatic from then on!

5. Unfollow People Who Are Not Following You: If you follow people on Twitter in the hope they will follow you back, and sadly find out that some don’t, you can use buzzom.com to help you unfollow them. It’s a bit weird only following people in the hope they will follow you back, but life is like that sometimes.

6. Use TweetAdder: If you are looking for something a LOT more powerful to automate your Twitter Tasks I would recommend TweetAdder to you!

I have just started using TweetAdder, and I would recommend it highly. It does exactly what it says it will do, and will help you do everything you could possibly imagine to automate your Twitter account.

It is like the Holy Grail of Twitter account management.

And that’s how I roll

Question: In what ways do YOU automate your Twitter account?
Question: Do you think automating your Twitter account will bring you bad twitter karma?

Lewis

Want to earn money on Squidoo?
Be honest.

Want to rank well in Google?
Genuinely help your readers.

Want to be a Giant Squid?
Don’t give up.

Want to be in the Top 100 Lists?
Learn from the best.

Want a lens that earns $hundreds per month?
Make a LOT of lenses.

Want your lenses to look beautiful?
Use lots of pictures.

Want more visitors to your lenses?
Make something worthy.

Want to have some fun?
Write about your passions.

Want to make a profit?
Write about what sells.

Don’t know what you want?
Just get started anyway.

And they just keep getting better!

His latest creation is the Lens Love Module.

How many times have you visited a lens, got to the bottom of it, and forgotten to rate it? If you’re like me, probably lots.

Tim’s Lens Love module will put a nice row of stars at the BOTTOM of your lens as well as the existing ones at the top, which means your lens visitors can get to the bottom and still rate your lens without forgetting.

You can click here to add the Lens Love Module to your lenses

And you can click here to see a live example and read Tim’s explanation of it

Oh beautiful wonderful Tim, what’s next!

Lewis

P.S. have you added this module to your lenses? Have you noticed more ratings than normal? Do you put it at the bottom, or somewhere in the middle? What are your thoughts?

Are you using every opportunity to earn money from your lenses and make every sale you can? Don’t beat yourself up about it. I wrote this lost as a guide for me to begin with.

Here are some things to consider:

• Are you adding affiliate links [to trusted products] within the text, linking keywords and phrases?

• Do you have a module on each lens with links to the top products for that topic?

• Have you added a relevant link to your Bio for each lens?

• Have you added the Featured Lens module to each lens to refer people between all your lenses?

• Have you added a poll? Have you made any of the answers into links?

• Do you look through the stats for your lenses and see what the most popular keywords are that people are using to find your lenses? This is a treasure trove of attainable keywords that you can make more lenses targeting!

• Do you feature your existing lenses in the sidebar of your new lenses using the Lensroll feature?

• Do you use your lenses to build mailing lists, for follow up compaigns on your profitable lenses? [if not check out www.squidootricks.com]

• Do you make more your lenses in clusters, making multiple lenses about a certain topic, looking at it from different angles and targeting different keywords?

• What else could you be doing to get each visitor to be worth more to you?

It’s about PROFIT!!

Lewis

I would guess that more than 99.9% of lensmasters treat their lensmaking time as a hobby. It pays rather nicely if you hit upon a great niche idea and write up some great content, but most of the time people are making lenses it’s probably more fun than work.

If it felt like work they probably wouldn’t do it as much, in their free time no less!

For the casual Squidoo Lensmaster making lenses as a hobby, the hope of earning some extra pocket money and getting some friendly guestbook comments is enough of an extra incentive to keep them going.

But what would happen if you took a pen and paper and wrote down some goals for your Squidoo Income?

If you began to treat it more like a mission than a hobby then some really magical things would start to happen. You would be motivated to make more lenses and make more profits, write more useful information, learn more money-making ideas, and really start to devote enough time to your lensmaking to do some REAL damage.

Let’s say you set yourself a task of building 5 new lenses a week to earn an extra $500 a month from Squidoo.

You could start by:

Making a lens about anything you buy online
Making a lens about anything you search google for but find no useful results
Making a lens about different places to visit in your home town or country
Making a lens about each book you read
Making a lens about each film you see
Making a lens about different affiliate products which inspire you
Making a lens about a celebrity
Making a lens about a favourite charity
Making a lens about your friend’s business
Making a lens about a question that’s been bugging you
Making a lens about the best software to do XYZ
Making a lens about making lenses!
Making a lens about your favourite recipe
Making a lens about anything you think will sell!

And before you know it a year has gone by and your 5 lenses a week have turned into an impressive roster of 260 lenses.

Out of all those lenses you will have made some absolute winners, and also some absolute duds. But it’s the only way to learn what will and won’t succeed.

Also, it won’t take you long making lenses about things you know to realise that some topics are more profitable than others, and you will naturally be drawn to them.

I have a lens that I wrote one day just for fun that has earned me over $7500 in the past 2 years (from affiliate sales). And I only struck upon the topic by making a load of dud lenses first and just thinking it would be cool to make a lens about so-and-so.

When you start to focus on reaching income goals with your lenses you can start to see the whole process in a whole new light. That lens really opened my eyes to what is possible. That one lens has earned an average $300+ a month for the last 2 years.

Do you see yourself as a real Internet Niche Marketer and are you treating your online money-making as a real business? Or is making money on Squidoo just an extra-pocket-money hobby?

Lewis

P.S. don’t get me wrong. Both are fine. Hobby or business. But if you are looking for the big bucks online… treat it as a goal-worthy business. That’s the only way you will make it to 100, 200, or 500+ lenses.

Squidoo has added some cool Facebook Connect connections.

Here is how the wonderful and beautiful and talented Megan Casey explains SquidooConnect: “SquidooConnect is like a bridge between Squidoo and Facebook. It helps your friends cross over to see your lenses, and helps you cross over to talk to people about your lenses on Facebook. It’s up to you how often you use it!”

She has made a lens answering questions at http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-facebook-connect

If you have not yet hooked your facebook profile up with your Squidoo account just head to http://www.squidoo.com/member/profile and scroll right to the bottom.

Are you going to use this Squidoo/Facebook connection? Do you keep your real life friends and your Squidoo lenses separate? And… what other Squidoo/Facebook integration would you like to see?

Lewis

Are you building a mailing list from your lenses?

When someone lands on your lens, how many chances of a sale do you get?

Mostly the answer will be… one.

If you get the person to look at a couple of your lenses then your chance of a sale doubles and triples.

But what if your lens visitors said to you ‘Hey! I like your style! Here, take my email address and send me cool stuff!’

If you could get your lens visitors to opt in to your newsletter or niche list then you would really start to turn yourself into a savvy niche marketer.

You can see this in action on many of my lenses.

I actually have one single lens that I have used to build a mailing list of over 4000 (FOUR THOUSAND!!) people, all interested in the same thing.

Now when I make a lens about that same topic… I just send them all a quick email letting them know. And voila. Instant audience. Instant income from any sales.

Are you wasting the chance to build an email list asset from your lenses?

I use an autoresponder company called Aweber. I highly recommend them, and they are the best at what they do.

And I’ve also put together a step by step guide on how to get live opt in forms onto your lenses which you can get from www.SquidooTricks.com.

If you are missing out on extra visitors and extra income from having your own fanbase, this week can be the time you change all that.

Lewis

P.S. there are companies like aweber which offer a free service, but it is most often a case of ‘You get what you pay for’. But for someone just starting out the free option at getresponse.com might be enough.

Squidoo groups have really begun to prove themselves in Google. In almost all cases they outrank lenses, get a higher PageRank, and get more backlinks naturally than lenses.

That’s right. Groups are outranking lenses in Google.

This means is would be incredibly wise for you to add Squidoo groups to your list of Google Ranking Weapons.

For Example: If you just made a lens about The Little Shop of Horrors, make a group for it too. You can target a slightly different keyword/phrase, add your lens to the group and feature it on the group homepage, and your lens sidebar will automatically link to the group.

Squidoo Groups have been partially hidden by Squidoo HQ because they haven’t had the time to devote to making them better as they have with lenses.

This means your groups don’t show on your lensmaster page, and the Workshop Edit mode tools are still very old compared to the fancy new workshop mode we have for making lenses. 

But they are still extremely powerful in Google. I have been looking lately at which Squidoo pages are ranking well in Google, and Groups always come up top. Above lenses with more content, even.

So start making companion groups to go with the lenses you want to get traffic to!

This is something I have not done enough of and am really going to start putting a lot of energy into.

Have you had good results with groups yet?

Lewis

You make a question lens, kind of like Yahoo Answers meets Squidoo, and people can write and vote answers via Twitter.

When they participate by answering your question a link to your lens appears on their Twitter profile page to all their Twitter followers. And if those followers participate then their followers see the link too. And on it goes…

It’s a viral creation. And it’s really rather slick. The Squidoo HQ people are quite a clever bunch.

You can see a nice example of a Twitter Storm lens here, and you can make your own here.

The whole Twitter Storm concept has given me some really cool ideas.

Yahoo answers gets a ton of visitors from google when people search for the same question, not just the keywords. For example instead of searching for ‘Best BlackBerry App’ they might search for ‘What are the best blackberry apps?’.

So I’m thinking.. I make a bunch of lenses to test this out and turn Squidoo TwitterStorm lenses into yahoo answer-type google traffic magnets. Phew! That’s something of a mouthful.

Handy use of guestbook modules, polls, and the Twitter storm tool itself could result in a really interactive, useful and viral page.
It’s definitely worth testing.

I have made a list of about 50 questions I am going to turn into lenses.

And if it turns out that a guestbook would have worked better than the new TwitterStorm tool then that’s something we will have to investigate…

How are you going to use Twitter Storm?

Lewis

P.S. you can follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/mrlewissmile

This is the easiest source of backlinks for your lenses.

Your other lenses!

If you get 1 person looking at 1 of your lenses, you have just had 1 chance of a sale.

If you manage to get that person to look at another one of your (related) lenses then you have just doubled your chances of a sale.

If you can turn 1 visitor into 2, or 3, or 4, then we’re talking about gaining fans and customers, not just visitor numbers on your dashboard!

Here is a short list to tick off to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get more people into your Squidoo net:

1. Do you use the Featured Lens module on all your lenses? You can use the Featured Lens module throughout the content and at the bottom to direct people to your related lenses. The Featured Lenses module is probably my favourite module.

2. Do you Lensroll your related lenses together? This makes a list of lens links appear in the sidebar of each lens to the other lenses. It is really easy to forget to do this because you need to visit each lens in order to lensroll it (it can’t be done from the sidebar in edit mode yet), so make sure you don’t forget this one!

3. Do you link keywords in the text to your other lenses? You can use a linkmaker tool I created to do this step if you don’t yet know how to write a html link into your lens: www.buildmylens.com/linkmaker The tool spits out code for you to put into a Text module on your lens.

4. Are you feeding your lenses into an rss module? This won’t count as backlinks in Google’s eyes, but it will work to get people to explore more of your lenses. You can put an RSS module as the last module on your lenses, and use it to list your other lenses. Just use your own version of the following link as the RSS Feed URL, but replace mrlewissmile with your own Squidoo username: http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lensmaster/mrlewissmile

Before you start thinking about what you can do to get backlinks from other sites and blogs first take a look at your growing list of lenses and see if you can do more to link them all together to create a huge network of links and lenses that a visitor could easily spend a few hours exploring

Lewis

A backlink is when another webpage or blog or lens links to your lens. They ‘link back’ to you, as if they are voting for you by linking to you. They trust you, and are willing to link to you.

A backlink is also known as an Inbound link, or an Incoming link.

When Google determines how high in the results to put your lens they look at how many backlinks it has, as it helps determine what is worth looking at.

In an ideal world every lens and blog post you write would be so utterly fantastic and groundbreaking that hundreds of people would be compelled to link to you. But this isn’t the case, because in an effort to compete in different niches you will target the keywords people are searching for.

So you will need to be proactive and generate as many backlinks as you can yourself.  As the old saying suggests: “If you want anything done, do it yourself”

Over the next few weeks I will be posting some great ways to build your backlinks. I will review some sites, recommend actions for you to take, and we’ll work on getting ranked higher in Google.

The one thing every lens will benefit from is more traffic. It’s funny – where else but in Internet Marketing is ‘TRAFFIC’ a good thing?!

Lewis